The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  “I don’t think that I’m inventive enough to dream up these impossible claims,” he said.

  Eventually people would come around.

  5

  The drip-drip-drip of discoveries divided Dylan’s community of followers. People took sides. Over here, Dylan was lambasted as a thief of intellectual property, a copyright violator, and a plagiarist. Over there, he was doing what artists had done for all time. He was celebrated as a creator of “modernist collages.” He was blurring the lines “between past and present . . . high art and low, scholarly and popular, exotic and familiar,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote in Bob Dylan in America. “Dylan created a new magic zone where it was 1933 and 1863 and 2006 all at once, where the full complexity of human nature might still be glimpsed.” He was a conjurer communicating with literary, musical, and cinematic ghosts.

  No Dylan fan wrote more eloquently about his disappointment in Dylan than a librarian and poet in England named Roy Kelly. He came of age in the 1960s, so he experienced the albums contemporaneously, unlike someone who had to piece them together later. His manner was friendly if fussy. He’d written all his life, producing lush short stories, formal English poetry, and lengthy pieces with literary ambition for two of the Dylan fanzines, John Bauldie’s Telegraph and its successor, the Bridge. He once wrote a piece about “Ron Bobfan,” a fictional conglomeration of Kelly and Bauldie, sprinkled with bits of every other fan he had known. Looking back on the wonder and genius of Dylan circa 1966, Ron is filled with self-conscious nostalgia and melancholy, a longing for the time when his hero was so original and fresh, when listening to him was so . . . uncomplicated.

  When Chronicles appeared, Kelly gave it a glowing review in the Bridge. Dylan, this man who onstage seems to be “deliberately absenting himself” from interaction with his audience, suddenly slung an arm around readers’ shoulders and laid out his story. Kelly was deeply unsettled to find out that the words were not all Dylan’s. “What did we praise him for then?” he says now. He felt misled, foolish, and let down—personally let down. Why not acknowledge his sources in some way? Why pass it off as his own? It prompted him to question not just the memoir but the music and the man. Was he entirely inauthentic? “All songs by Bob Dylan,” the liner notes read. Kelly had believed that. He couldn’t feel quite the same way about a cut-and-paste man. “It just bothers me,” he says. “And I can’t be unbothered now.”

  This squeamishness about artistic appropriation makes Jonathan Lethem practically foam at the mouth. Lethem, the best-selling author of The Fortress of Solitude and seven other novels, grew up in a bohemian, communal, countercultural household in a racially mixed neighborhood in Brooklyn. “The first time I realized that there were still people alive who thought rock ’n’ roll sounded like noise, I laughed. I was like, Really? You can still think that? I thought this stuff was canonical for a thousand years.” He lived in a bubble: He spent the 1970s wrapping his head around the idea that the hippies had not won. His parents were political activists who marched against the war. Lethem came from a place so left-wing that he couldn’t even visualize a Republican. “Everybody knew Nixon was a vampire, right?” He thinks of people who get hung up on Dylan’s writing technique in the same way. Are there really people who believe the words just poured out of his heart, totally original, unsullied by influences? Do they really think his songs open a window on his soul?

  Lethem’s mother had a “streak of yippie in her.” She dropped out of Queens College in 1962 and ran away to the Greenwich Village folk scene. She hung around with Dave Van Ronk, knew Tuli Kupferberg, dated Phil Ochs, met Dylan once. After “Like a Rolling Stone” came out, the story in the Lethem household was that one of their Siamese cats inspired the line about riding on the chrome horse with the diplomat. The Lethems bred them, and his mother had given one to Ochs, who carried it around on his shoulder. “I don’t know whether to believe it,” Lethem says. “It was what I was told growing up.”

  The point is that his parents were invested in Dylan, and the myth was intimate. This was a catechism: Bob Dylan was the artist of their generation. “He was like total received information for me, part and parcel of coming of age in my family.” He had to reject Dylan for a time and find his way back to him. At fifteen, Lethem claimed Slow Train Dylan as his own. The Christian era didn’t bother him because, like rock music haters and Republicans, he considered fundamentalist born-agains figments of the imagination. Slow Train was like the science fiction Lethem devoured.

  In 2007, Harper’s published an essay by Lethem about creative borrowing that was itself cobbled together almost entirely from other sources; he outlined what came from where at the end of the article. Quotation is essential to creativity, Lethem argued. “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism.”

  “Original is a fascinating word,” Lethem told me. “People throw it around all the time. ‘Oh, that was so original.’ They mean they don’t know where it came from.” What he means is that everything comes from somewhere else. The most original writers—Updike, Hemingway, Beckett—all of them started by imitating those who came before. Lethem was incredulous that this was even a matter of discussion in the Dylan world. People who felt let down had been invested in a misunderstanding. Talking about it sent him into fits.

  “Who cares?” he says. “If you don’t want to know, don’t know! Just enjoy what you’re given. The thing that affected you is still exactly as it is. The sources are also still exactly as they were. If you want to read Confessions of a Yakuza, Dylan has not fucked it up for you. It’s right there. Go read that. Now both things exist. Why would that not be better? Chronicles is still exactly what it is. It still does what it does. It’s spellbinding. Dylan could have phoned in a book. This is Dylan making something for us. How can you complain? I just don’t get it.”

  Everybody steals, Dylan’s defenders cry. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was filled with allusive borrowings. William Burroughs sliced up sentences from newspapers and books and inserted the words in his own work. “All writing is in fact cut-ups,” Burroughs said. “A collage of words read heard overheard.” The Dadas suggested cutting up an article from a newspaper, putting the slips in a bag, shaking it, then pulling out the words and copying them down in order to form a new poem. French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was unapologetic about quoting material without acknowledgment. “Everything is a remix,” argues Kirby Ferguson in a series of Web videos showing how Steve Jobs swiped ideas from his competitors when he built the Macintosh computer, and how George Lucas copied classic films to make Star Wars. It’s an idea for our time. We live in an age of sampling.

  Surely, Dylan knew that his appropriations would not go unnoticed, argued poet and scholar Stephen Scobie. “Dylan knows that all his work is subject to intense scrutiny; he must surely have expected that his ‘sources’ would sooner or later be revealed. There is no intent to deceive: rather, there is an invitation to join the game.” It was hard not to read some sections of Chronicles as thinly veiled answers to his detractors. Dylan writes about playing King of the Delta Blues Singers for an unimpressed Van Ronk. “He kept pointing out that this song comes from another song and that one song was an exact replica of a different song,” Dylan wrote. “He didn’t think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be.”

  In 2003, he described for a music writer how he meditated: by playing songs in his head. He may do it while he’s driving, or sitting around, even having a conversation. “People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head,” he said. “At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

  Other hints leaked out about how Dylan worked. Joni Mitchell recalled him telling her sometime in the second half of h
is career that he was having trouble writing. She told him that couldn’t be, and cited some recent song he had written.

  “Oh,” Dylan told her, “the box wrote it.”

  “What do you mean, the box?”

  “I write down things from movies and things I’ve heard people say,” Dylan said, “and I throw them in the box.”

  “I don’t care where you get your bits and pieces,” she replied. “You still put them all together.”

  Larry Charles saw Dylan’s box in action. In 2001, the TV writer, director, and producer was summoned to discuss doing a television series with the singer. Dylan and Charles instead ended up cowriting a movie, Masked and Anonymous, in which Dylan starred alongside John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Penelope Cruz. When he walked into the first meeting, Charles said he found a box on the table. Dylan dumped it, and out came scraps of paper, some of it hotel stationery. Every piece had a phrase or name or aphorism scrawled on it. These were Dylan’s building blocks.

  In 2012, Dylan finally dropped the pretenses with a remarkable answer to a question from Rolling Stone. At seventy-one, it turned out, he had not mellowed. He was as blunt and bitter as ever. He called his borrowings “quotation,” and noted that it was a tradition in folk and jazz. His critics, he complained, were holding him to a different standard.

  “And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned,” Dylan said, “have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing—it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back.

  “These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.”

  The interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, was taken aback. “Seriously?”

  “It’s called songwriting,” Dylan continued. “It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.”

  6

  Scott stayed out of the exhausting debates about whether Dylan was a plagiarist or not, and instead zeroed in on how specific borrowings worked. Much of Chronicles and many songs had been annotated, but the hard work of understanding Late Dylan really had only just begun.

  People started to wonder how Scott had learned so much about the borrowings that Dylan hid in his writing. Some guessed that he was supremely well read. One asked if he was using some special software. Another theorized that Scott had access to Dylan’s private papers. “I am very curious about Mr. Warmuth’s methods,” one follower of the blog wrote on an online forum. “I’ve often half-­wondered if he isn’t somehow linked to Dylan’s people, like Dylan is trying to get the word out about it himself. After having read most of Mr. Warmuth’s works, I’m pretty convinced.” It amused Scott that people had built him into an enigmatic figure like Dylan himself. But maybe it was to be expected.

  Scott’s research took him into surprising fields, and he brought readers of his increasingly popular blog along for the ride. He studied circus sideshows, puzzle solving, cryptography, and magic. He searched for inspiration in The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. He read books about cheating at cards. He studied the ways Vladimir Nabokov used ciphers and hidden allusions. All the while he searched for ways past Dylan’s defenses. Trying to figure out how Dylan might have hidden things, he contacted magicians and talked to pitchmen; maybe it would be helpful to learn a few of their tricks. He searched out people who performed in medicine shows. As it turned out, more than a few of them were Dylan fans.

  Every September the New Mexico state fair set up shop at the expo grounds at the foot of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque. Scott loved the carnies and pitchmen, who seemed to represent the seedier reality lurking behind the fair’s friendly, gaudy veneer. He liked to sit and watch the man who gave the elaborate pitch for expensive stainless-steel pots and pans, and the guy who sold trick toy worms for five bucks each. The midway had a snake woman. “Stop. Wait,” a disembodied voice said from above the tent. “How could this ever come to be? The strangest illusion of all time—the head of a lovely girl, and the body of an ugly snake.” One year, Scott struck up a conversation with the keeper of the World’s Smallest Horse, a man named Ray. The tiny beast had lived with Ray for three years. He liked television and was pretty well housebroken, unless you didn’t get the door open right away. Scott and Ray got to talking about the carny life, and Ray slipped into a jive that may as well have been a foreign tongue. For most of his forty-three-year career, he had worked rigged games called “flat joints,” and as he told Scott about this, he slipped into memorized and barely intelligible patter. If you didn’t understand it, that was exactly the point. Ray’s idea was to relieve you of your wallet. Scott got to know all kinds of circus slang. Carnival “talkers” used chatter (“bally”) to drum up audiences at sideshow tents. “Turning the tip” was when a talker converted lollygaggers into paying customers. And “G.T.F.M.” was a carny slogan: Get The Fucking Money.

  Scott’s hypothesis was a work in progress, unfolding blog post by blog post, but the more he thought about Late Dylan, the more he saw the ethos of the carnival life. He called his blog Goon Talk, which is carny slang for carny slang. Understand this world, Scott thought, and maybe he could understand what Dylan was doing when he offered up something original and it turned out to be pastiche. Maybe the man who took from high culture and low and melded them into art was not so far removed from the pitchmen and con men at the circus.

  Scott began to think of Dylan as a charlatan of sorts. He didn’t mean that the singer was a fraud. Instead he thought of Dylan as a fabulous illusionist. He wasn’t what he appeared to be. “Magicians do what con men do,” Scott wrote, “except that the audience knows an illusion is being created.” The singer had been fascinated by the freak show all his life. He told early interviewers that he had joined the circus as a child. His 1965 song “Ballad of a Thin Man” sends clueless Mr. Jones through a sideshow, where he is accosted by a sword swallower, a geek, and a one-eyed midget. The 1975–76 Rolling Thunder Revue mimicked a carnival: a caravan of ­performers would show up in some town with little announcement, make a spectacle, then disappear. Years later, on a TV ad for “Love and Theft,” Dylan played cards with master magician and actor Ricky Jay. For ten years, Dylan opened his concerts with an introduction taken almost verbatim from a gushing Buffalo News story in 2002. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the patter went, “please welcome the poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll, the voice of the promise of the sixties counterculture, the guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the seventies and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to ‘find Jesus,’ who was written off as a has-been by the end of the eighties, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late nineties.”

  “That’s bally!” Scott says. Step right up, folks, and feast your eyes on this! It was the nonsense shtick outside a sideshow exhibit.

  In the movie he made with Larry Charles, Masked and Anonymous, Dylan played a failed musical messiah. Reviewing the movie, the New York Times marveled about the mythology Dylan had built up around himself since arriving in the city in 1961. “His lifelong foraging in the overgrown pastures of American popular culture has taught him that the true prophet is often indistinguishable from the snake-oil salesman, and his gaunt, weathered frame contains both personas.”

  Dylan ruminated about prophets and fal
se prophets three decades earlier in liner notes to 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the record he released after the motorcycle wreck that amplified his mystique. Dylan lampooned three wise men who search for the key to the songs. “The key is Frank!” the men decide, and they visit an apparently ordinary man named Frank. Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record, they tell Frank, and they have been led to believe that he is the key. “Could you please open it up for us?” they ask.

  “And just how far would you like to go in?”

  “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say we’ve been there,” one replies.

  Frank puts on a great show for them, tearing off his shirt and punching his fist through a window, and the kings leave happy.

  Read Scott’s findings about Chronicles long enough and you get an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach. You feel like the police detective in the last scene of The Usual Suspects. On the trail of Keyser Söze, he spends the entire film questioning a man played by Kevin Spacey who says he worked for the legendary killer. At the end of the film, the detective figures out—just a moment too late—that the man in his office all day was Söze, and the mastermind had been concocting an elaborate cover story using words and names and images he found on the office walls.

  “I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles about Daniel Lanois, who produced Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind, “but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles.” This was a little elbow nudge for the attuned reader. Like an illusionist, he was commenting on what he was doing while he was doing it. “It was always right in front of you, blended together,” he wrote elsewhere in the memoir, “but you’d have to pull it apart to make any sense of it.” Dylan also tipped his hand in interviews when the book was released. “Chronicles just means—I’m not sure what it means, but it would seem to be some kind of thing where you can make right use of the past,” Dylan said. The tell was so subtle that you’d read right over it if you weren’t clued in to the ruse.